


both people and apples are rotten

by idaate



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Spoilers, every time i write pregame saihara he becomes more relatable but a worse person, pregame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 14:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11381865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idaate/pseuds/idaate
Summary: [ MAJOR V3 SPOILERS ]The blood inDanganronpais pink, but Saihara gets drunk off of the color red.





	both people and apples are rotten

**Author's Note:**

> Me, upon leaving school for the summer: Wow I'm so ready to get back to writing fanfics!  
> Me:
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> In other news, I've hit a sort of a rut, aha-- I've grown consistently more unhappy with my writing over time but, for now, I hope that this will make up for the fact that I haven't uploaded anything new for exactly a month.

Apples are red. So is blood. Blood is red, just like apples.

That is, save for the blood in _Danganronpa._ It’s not red, like ‘regular’ blood, nor like the apple that Saihara takes a bite of, staring at the screen as the six remaining participants barter between the benefits of hope and despair (usually, the former is the clear winner but the protagonist of this season was particularly terrible and it had been a particularly long time since despair had won out so the executives were clearly pulling more than a few strings this time around). Saihara hopes it’s despair, because he also hates the protagonist - they were a classmate of his, once upon a time.

Someone who was...you know, the _s_ word. Unique. Different. They stood out.

Just like the _Danganronpa_ blood. It was edited to appear a blaring bright pink, a ‘special effect’ that supposedly kept the rating down, just a tad bit. Who knew that turning the entrails that spilled out of your stomach from red to pink on a live death television show would keep the ratings down, right?

Well, whatever. Saihara could find the original red blood edits uploaded on the internet sometime next week, probably. It wasn’t exactly legal, but killing people wasn’t legal unless it was on live television anyway so what was a few more exceptions to the ‘legal and not legal’ rule.

His phone buzzes from a couple feet away, and he glances over at the screen as it lights up and then goes black all over again.

Didn’t that death god like eating apples? From that anime that was popular a long ways back. The thought comes slightly unbidden to his mind, and as he turns down the volume just a little once he realizes how late it is, Saihara thinks it’s somewhat appropriate. Don’t apples represent...something? He doesn’t really get what, but maybe it was truth or how good of a person you were. Or, in that western fairytale, didn’t Snow White eat an apple and get fucked over? She was lucky she hadn’t died from eating something poisoned, honestly, who was dumb enough to accept food from a stranger and eat it on the _spot,_ especially an exceedingly shady looking stranger who--

His phone buzzes again and Saihara groans, picking it up. He checks the texts he received before turning the phone off - it was yet another offer to be his friends’ (it was “friends” in quotation marks, a whole lot of quotation marks actually) getaway driver. Or something. Saihara didn’t actually know what it entailed, but it certainly wasn’t legal. Saihara was an exceptional little boy, and didn’t get involved in illegal things.

Sometimes. Usually. Unless it was searching up those ‘we took the edited pink blood and edited it again to make it red blood, which is what it was originally’ videos, which wasn’t legal, but it wasn’t highly illegal, anyway.

Saihara tosses his phone to the side and bites into his apple again. It truly seemed like they were going to give into despair, now, and Saihara was glad, even if the family of the protagonist a couple blocks down most certainly wouldn’t be. Well, he would hear their mourning cries in the morning.

It...really _was_ rather late, wasn’t it? Saihara scratches his chin and decides that he’s growing bored. He prefers the red anyway, so he can just wait a week till he can watch the protagonist’s execution the way he wants to.

He shuts off the television, tosses the half-eaten apple at the trash bin a couple feet away, misses, and sighs.

 

.

 

The bathroom of the _Danganronpa_ audition place has some fancy squirt soap bottles, with glass bottles decorated in flowers and a handle that might or might not be made out of gold. Saihara spends his time burning his anxiety away by holding the soap bottles in his hand and trying to squirt out the word _‘Danganronpa’_ on his hand with the soap but he only gets through the first three letters before he either runs out of space or messes up the first letter and has to go back at redo it all again.

One of the other teenagers walks by and tells him to stop wasting soap. He doesn’t even look up, but the bottle gets more slippery in his hands. They walk away.

The little buzzer that they gave him (you know, like the ones they gave you when you were waiting in line in a restaurant) hums from its spot on the bathroom’s sink counter, and Saihara gets so startled that he drops the soap bottle and sends shards of glass flying in every which direction. He stops and stares for all of two beats before he mutters under his breath that it was almost empty anyway, so it didn’t matter.

He wipes his soap-covered hands on his pants and rushes out of the bathroom, where the usher sees the buzzer in his hands and gives a stiff nod in his direction. “Go get ‘em, tiger,” they say, and Saihara flashes a grin a mile wide as he steps inside the booth, feet hitting the tiles with nervous clatters.

Then the light turns on, the light that’s just like a shining, glittering spotlight, and someone clears their voice and shuffles some papers in their hands.

Saihara thinks about how great it will be to see the pink blood as red as an apple and tells the people behind the speakers how excited he is to die.

As he finishes the interview with an elated feeling in his stomach, he sees a shorter boy with dark purple hair stutter his way into the booth that Saihara had just exited. The ushers says “go get ‘em, tiger!” just like they did with Saihara and that turns the elated feeling in his stomach to a particularly not-so-elated feeling. 

“O-or get eaten up, tiger,” he calls lamely after the boy, and the usher stares at him strangely. Saihara pulls the brim of his cap down in embarrassment and hurries out of the room as fast as he can.

 

.

 

“Ah, we’re out of apples!” Saihara calls out to his uncle in the living room, who lets out a noncommittal noise that the boy hopes means ‘yeah, I’ll go get some more soon, don’t worry yourself about it’ or something along those lines. He closes the cupboard that he had opened and looks around the kitchen, picks up the glass of apple juice that he put down earlier, and walks over to living room to join his uncle.

The older man is staring at some papers in his hands and glances between them and Saihara. “Hey...are you sure this is the best idea you’ve had?”

“What is?” Saihara leans down to look at the papers, sees that it’s the copy of the forms he made for _Danganronpa,_ and takes a sip of his apple juice. “Oh, yeah. I hope I’ll get in, don’t you? If I don’t get in, that’s a waste of three thousand yen. Cause that was the admission fee.”

His uncle looks down at the papers and then back up at him again. Saihara takes a stronger sip of his juice. “Couldn’t you have...I don’t know, talked to me about this first?” There’s a certain tiredness in his voice that Saihara isn’t sure he likes, and he frowns.

“What? Aren’t you always saying I should be more ‘responsible’ and ‘take responsibility for my actions’?” Saihara makes air quotations in the air with his fingers and almost drops his glass. “Well, this is me doing just that. I even used my own savings for the admission fee, you know. And if I die, I’m sending the money your way. If I win, well, then I’ll give you a decently sized portion. It’s all going to work out in the end!”

Saihara smiles and smiles because it makes _perfect_ sense, but his uncle frowns. “Don’t you think that maybe not _everything_ is about money, sometimes…? Consider the fact that you have a whole life ahead of you, Saihara. A life full of,” he glances down at the glass in Saihara’s hand, “...apples, I suppose. Meeting cute girls, or boys, or people who aren’t either and settling down with them. Living your whole life out. A _normal_ life.”

Saihara almost hears him out - almost - but the moment the last sentence slips out of his mouth the glass in his hand slips out as well and breaks against the carpet just like the soap bottle did in the bathroom. Saihara apologizes without meaning it and leans down to pick the shards up, pricks his finger, and stares at the drop of red blood that beads out of the tip of his finger.

“Oh gosh, are you alright?” His uncle asks, leaning down to check if Saihara is alright, but Saihara pulls away.

“I’m fine,” he says, but that’s a lie because he’s staring at his finger and feeling the blood rush to his head all over again. He swallows. “I’m gonna head to my room, if that’s okay.”

“Of course! Let me-- let me just get you a bandaid, alright?”

His uncle stands up and shuffles out of the room, and Saihara licks his lips and wonders if he should stop at the store to buy more apples or if he should pick up his phone and scroll through older texts.

 

.

 

Sweat pours down Saihara’s brow as he holds the metal bat offered to him, weighing it in his hands experimentally. “Is...this really alright?”

“It’s _illegal,_ dumbass.” Someone hits him over his head, shifting his hat into an awkward position so he has to pause and readjust it. “Of _course_ it’s not alright. If you ask the cops. But in my opinion? Yeah, it’s pretty alright to get a free million or so yen.”

“It’s not exactly _free,”_ Saihara says half-heartedly, but it’s just that - half-heartedly, not with his full heart in the matter. The thought of standing out, even in the more shady of ways, is too good of an offer for him to pass up. He wonders how satisfying it will be to bash someone’s head in and see red pour out instead of pink, but that isn’t what he’s doing tonight (probably).

“All you need to do is bash the window open, then book it back to the car. We’ll grab the money n’ goods and be right behind you, alright?” There’s a pat on his back instead of his head this time, and that’s a little bit easier. “It’s going to be quick and easy, and your pockets will be just a little bit fuller so you can get...uh,”

“Apples.”

“Apples. If that’s what your pretty little face desires.” They laugh pleasantly through the dark, and Saihara’s hands tighten around the bat a little bit tighter as he smiles back at them.

They put on black clothing and wrap themselves up in scarves all the same and Saihara thinks he looks like a villain in one of those movies, you know, the ones on television where they _don’t_ edit the blood to look pink. He pulls his scarf over his face and makes a funny pose in the mirror, thinks he looks remarkably not-normal, and one of the other kids tells him to hurry up. He does.

The drive there doesn’t take immensely long, and they park a ridiculously long way away from store (saihara thinks it’s a jewelry place but he didn’t bother to ask) but the walk there isn’t that tiresome anyhow. Saihara grips his hands so tightly around the metal bat that someone taps him on the shoulder and asks if he’s alright, if he needs to sit out. He says he’s fine, and they look at him like they don’t believe that but don’t press the matter. Saihara is thankful.

He stands in front of the window when they get there and stares at his own reflection. It stares back, and Saihara is struck by how pretty he looks.

“H-hey, dude, can you hit it now, already?”

Saihara leans back and then comes in swinging, bat smashing his reflection into a thousand glittering pieces. The group of kids with him lets out a cheer as the alarms are activated, and like a wave, surges forward.

“First-rate work! Head over to the car now, alr--”

Saihara hits the glass again, nearly hitting one of the other kids. They curse and glare at him. “Hey, watch it! You could’ve gotten me there!”

He hits again. And again. And again.

There are a lot of voices around him - too many even, maybe, possibly - but Saihara just keeps on hitting the glass over and over until his hands are raw and he can see some red, red blood trickle down the handle. The alarms sing a beautiful chorus in the background, fitting this all to a T.

He only stops when everyone has run away and left him behind. Saihara drops the metal bat, leans down and grabs a shard of glass just as more hands reach behind him and put him in handcuffs, and suddenly he can see the red and blue lights that flash everywhere.

His grip around the glass tightens, and he lets out a stuttered gasp as the sharp pain pierces through his senses and makes him drop the shard of glass, too.

“Calm the fuck down, kid.” Someone mutters in his ear. “Jesus, did you just get your thirty-day chip from anger management and decide to celebrate by wrecking someone’s store?” They click their tongue and begin to turn him away, towards a police car. “You’re lucky no one got hurt, what with you swinging that bat like that. I was convinced you were going to slip and fall and stab your stomach on the glass shards. _God,_ that would’ve been a mess to clean up.” They chuckle to themselves, apparently amused.

Saihara doesn’t answer, his mind on the pain in his hand and on the steady _drip, drip, drip_ of the blood as it leaves his body, undoubtedly staining the ground red. 

(he should be enjoying it. why isn’t he enjoying it)

 

.

 

It’s like one of those crime shows, with the light beating down over him and the entire room dark save for the spotlight centered on him (him! him!), and Saihara can’t help but feel like he’s back getting interviewed about why he should die on live television instead of somebody else except this time around it’s not for a matter that’s nearly as fun.

One of the guards looks over at him nervously, like he’s a criminal (which he is, technically) and asks if he wants anything to eat.

“Oh, an apple,” he says, “and...a red one if possible.”

“So, like, a red delicious, gala, fuji…?”

“Is this a restaurant? I honestly don’t care, as long as it’s red.”

The guard looks at him strangely but nods, leaving the room as a woman with long grey hair all tucked up into a neat bun walks into the room. Saihara follows her through half-lidded eyes and wonders when he can get home.

She sits down in the chair in front of him and clears her throat awkwardly. “Do you...know why you’re here?”

“I ruined someone’s shop, aided in robbery,” Saihara stares at the light till his black spots dance in front of his eyes, “right? That’s why I’m in _biiiiig_ trouble.”

“Well, you’re not wrong,” the woman says tiredly, and the guard returns to him with an apple in hand. He hands it to him and Saihara nods in appreciation, taking a big, delicious bite of it and letting the juices run down his chin. Somehow, in a situation such as this, it tasted all the more delicious. “but I’m talking about _here,_ specifically. Why you’re in this room and not behind bars at the moment.”

Saihara takes a few slow chews of the apple and then shakes his head. “Ah, no. Apologies. Should...should I know, or…?”

The woman stares at him for a couple beats more before sighing and resting her forehead on the palm of her hand. “No, no,” she hums, “I wouldn’t expect you to, but it was a shot in the dark. In case you already knew and you thought that it would protect you when you committed crimes, and you would be able to escape the swift hammer of justice and all that _just_ because of that. Not like anything would change in the situation, whether you did it on purpose or not, but.” She laughs tiredly, and Saihara stares at her blankly.

“Uhm,” he mutters, “could you...fill me in on the blanks that I’m missing?”

“You got accepted as one of the participants of _Danganronpa,”_ she says, wringing her hands in the air. “so I suppose some sort of congratulations is in order. Except, frankly, I don’t care. Your newfound status really just prevents me from being able to arrest you properly.”

Saihara chokes on the piece of apple in his throat, and the woman pauses and looks at him with a touch of concern.

“Ah, are you alright? Sure, I want you to get punished for what you did wrong, but dying isn’t--”

“I’m great, I’m fine,” Saihara waves a hand through watering eyes, wheezing, “continue with whatever you were saying. _Please.”_

The woman nods tentatively. “Alright, well. I’m just sort of a messenger at this point, so…” She frowns and taps the side of her face, as if trying to remember something. “First, I have to ask you if you accept. There’s still some time before everything goes underway, but until then, you can back out of _Danganronpa_ at any time. There are more than a few people on the waiting list, after all.” Her mouth quirks into a grin. Saihara nods frantically.

“Of _course_ I accept,” he says, taking another bite of his apple. “who wouldn’t?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised how many people get cold feet.” She twirls a strand of her hair almost absentmindedly. “Anyhow, you still need to get punished _somehow,_ so they’re going to be keeping you in the facility where most of Team _Danganronpa_ works until the game begins. Some participants choose to go there before the game anyway, if their living situation is somewhat unconventional, so you might run into a few others. You won’t be allowed a phone or laptop or anything, though you do get one free call to someone outside. Do you have anyone you’d like to all?”

“Nope.” Saihara doesn’t hesitate when he says it, but doesn’t like the look of pity he gets from her when he says that, so maybe he should’ve lied anyway. Ah, whatever.

Saihara tunes out the rest of the conversation, head tilted and resting on the back of the chair as he stares at the ceiling and wonders, if he asks specifically, will they keep the blood in his execution red instead of editing it pink? He hopes they will.

He chases the thoughts about how maybe pain isn’t quite his thing down far, far away, because he must love it, right? He’s this far anyways. There isn’t exactly a going back, now - unless, God forbid, he wanted to be _normal._

He takes another bite of his apple.

 

.

 

“You...you’re _that_ p-person…”

Saihara tips back his chair, the apple’s core hanging loosely between his fingertips. “Hm? I’m which person?”

The cafeteria is fairly empty, ‘fairly’ meaning that the only people in there besides them were a few Team _Danganronpa_ employees. Those people, of course, and the boy in front of him. “You said...you said that you hoped I was eaten. Back then. Also, didn’t you get...arrested?”

Saihara stares at him and his dark purple hair blankly until it clicks. _“Ooooh,_ you’re that kid back from the audition place!” He snaps his fingers and grins. “Uhm...sorry about that, I suppose. Well, we both got in, so that’s what matters, right?”

“R-right.”

A couple awkward pauses, and then Saihara extends his hand, realizes that the apple core is still in it, and switches hands. He clears his throat. “I’m Saihara Shuuichi, you know.”

“I-I do know, actually.” The smaller boy takes his hand. “I’m...Ouma Kokichi. It’s n-nice to make your, your acquaintance.”

“...Same?” Saihara gives Ouma’s hand a few firm shakes before letting it drop to his side. “Yeah, same. I really look forward to...uhm,”

Killing you?

“...being in a game with you. Maybe we’ll both win? Or maybe just I will die.” Saihara laughs. Ouma doesn’t.

“In, in other news,” Ouma clearly came here with a plan, and Saihara only finds that a little strange - conversations were a stressful thing, God knows, “you like apples, right? I mean,” his eyes flicker towards the core in the taller boy’s hand, “you...yeah.”

The implications of the statement rub Saihara awkwardly, and he raises an eyebrow. “I do like apples, you haven’t got that wrong. What of it?”

“I...got an apple for you.” Ouma fumbles with something behind his back, and produces a perfectly round and shiny and _red_ apple. “I saw it and thought of you.”

Saihara’s mouth quirks. “Oh...thanks?” He picks up the apple from Ouma’s hand and turns it over in his own, eyeing it awkwardly. “Here, I’ll trade you.”

Dropping the core of the former apple into Ouma’s still outstretched hand, he prepares to bite into the new apple. Ouma frowns unpleasantly.

Saihara’s teeth sink into the apple, revealing it to be terribly rotten almost immediately. His face contorts and he throws it over at Ouma, sputtering and wiping his tongue frantically in order to rid himself of the taste. “Oh, great symbolism!” he says sarcastically, but Ouma has already turned and begun walking away. _“Super_ original, you piece of shit. Like no one has ever thought up of the ‘rotten to the core’ metaphor before!”

Ouma shudders a bit and picks up his step.

“You’re just as awful as me, you know!” Saihara raises his voice. “You signed up for this of your own free will. No one forced you to! You could and _can_ still back out of this all, but you aren’t! Because this is what you want!”

Ouma pauses and glances back at Saihara, and Saihara feels a sudden surge of self-consciousness.

“What I’m saying is, you aren’t as special as you think you are.” Saihara mutters, painfully aware of the Team _Danganronpa_ employees glancing his way.

Ouma stares and stares and stares until it makes Saihara uncomfortable. “I hate people just, just l-like you,” he finally stutters, and then walks off leaving Saihara aware of how painfully cliche the conversation that they just had was. How scripted it had felt.

Well, acceptable practice for what was coming up, he supposed, and spit on the ground. The rotten apple taste was still there.

 

.

 

There’s a jittery feeling in Saihara’s step as he walks down the hallway, head held high as they take him to the ‘memory wipe chamber’ - or the pre-memory wipe chamber, anyways. They have to give him a nice washing out before they put him in the game, where they would make him recall that he was kidnapped by a bunch of strange figures before _again_ they made him remember that he was the Super High-School Level Detective, that he was in a killing game, that he would see the color red until it made his head spin.

He briefly thinks - oh, never did see my uncle again, maybe should’ve taken up that call with him while I had the chance - before an assistant straps him into a chair just like you see in movies and tell him to ‘sit tight’ and ‘it’ll be over before you know it’.

Saihara smiles as he closes his eyes and leans back into the chair’s headrest, breathing in through his nose as he waits for his mind to go blank-- would that be pleasant? He hopes so. He hopes that even when he doesn’t remember anything about himself, when he’s a completely different person, that he’ll love apples, because they’ll keep some apples in the cafeteria, right? Right. They’ve had them in past seasons.

The taste of apples, imaginary or otherwise, was still delicious even before his metaphorical death penalty.

(and then, like the assistant said, saihara knows it)

 

.

 

Saihara takes one look at the red blood seeping out of Amami’s head and forming a sticky, saturated pool on the floor and has to sprint over to the nearest trash can, unable to fight the taste of vomit creeping up his throat.

Red is the most disgusting color he has ever laid eyes upon.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments and kudos if you've enjoyed!


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